Brazil's misery worsens with Argentina in final

By Karl Ritter

Associated Press

POSTED: 8:20 a.m. HST, Jul 10, 2014

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Soccer fans of the Argentina national soccer team celebrate their team's victory during a live broadcast of the soccer World Cup match between Argentina and the Netherlands, inside the FIFA Fan Fest area on Copacabana beach, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Wednesday.

SAO PAULO >> After
their own World Cup hopes fell apart in the most humiliating way,
Brazilians must now grapple with the prospect that things could get even
worse.

Argentina could win.

After beating the Netherlands
in a shootout Wednesday, Brazil's football archrival is now
tantalizingly close to winning the World Cup for the first time since
Diego Maradona lifted the trophy in 1986.

To many Brazilians,
Argentina becoming world champion on Brazilian soil would be the worst
imaginable ending to the monthlong tournament.

"We have a rule: we
always go against the Argentines," said Izabele Chiamolere, a
39-year-old physician from Sao Paulo. Like most Brazilians who attended
Wednesday's semifinal, she cheered for the Netherlands.

Or rather, against Argentina.

Chiamolere
said that on the train to the Itaquerao Stadium before the game,
Argentine fans were already taunting Brazilians with a song that's
become their anthem at this World Cup.

With a melody based on "Bad
Moon Rising," the song asks Brazilians how it feels to know that
Argentina will dominate Brazil in its own backyard, that Messi will lift
the cup and that "Maradona is greater than Pele."

When the
Argentine fans first arrived in Brazil with their Lionel Messi shirts,
pope masks and funny hats, Brazilians tended to just laugh along with
this song. Now it's starting to get under the skin for some people.

"If
the Argentines win they will become very annoying," said Giselle
Giannocco, a 40-year-old professor of physiology from the Federal
University of Sao Paulo.

At the heart of this intense South
American rivalry is the competition between two giants of world football
and the never-ending bickering over which player was greater, Pele or
Maradona.

But it goes deeper than that.

Brazilians and
Argentines get along in general and relations between the two countries
are good -- Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff picked Argentina for her
first foreign trip after being elected. Still, Chiamolere claimed,
Argentines have a reputation of acting arrogantly toward their neighbors
on the continent.

"They think they are the most European country
in Latin America," she said. "In the past, in many ways they were better
than us. But after all the political problems that both countries have
had, nowadays we are doing better than them."

Argentina today has a
much smaller economy than Brazil and less political clout on the world
stage. The Argentine fans, though, don't seem to be bothered about that
balance of economic power -- as long as they can claim supremacy in
football.

Their song at the World Cup includes the dubious claim that Argentina is Brazil's "papa."

Even
though Argentina has more Copa America titles, Brazil is the most
successful nation on the biggest stage, with five World Cup titles to
Argentina's two.

The gap could narrow on Sunday, though, which is
why so many Brazilians will cheer for Germany in the final in Rio de
Janeiro even though the Germans badly bruised Brazil's self-esteem with a
7-1 rout in the semifinals.

As the German goals poured in,
Argentine schadenfreude spilled onto social media with cheeky references
to the 'How-does-it-feel?' song.

But some Argentine fans insisted they felt no joy when Brazil was thoroughly beaten.

"I
was sad because I was hoping for an Argentina-Brazil final," said
Alejandro Salerno, a 48-year-old from Buenos Aires who traveled to Sao
Paulo for the Netherlands game. "Now we feel that we have to beat
Germany. In a South American World Cup, a South American team has to
win."

Sentiment will certainly be divided among Brazilians on
Sunday when Messi leads his Argentina team onto the pitch of Rio de
Janeiro's Maracana stadium, the spiritual home of Brazilian football.

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